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Scaling Multi-Objective Optimization for Clustering Malware

2021· article· en· W4206989464 on OpenAlex
Noah MacAskill, Zachary Wilkins, A. Nur Zincir‐Heywood

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

Venue2021 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques
Canadian institutionsDalhousie University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsMalwareObfuscationCluster analysisComputer scienceExecutableMalware analysisIdentification (biology)Data miningMachine learningComputer securityOperating system

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Malware continues to be a growing concern in cyber-security. The evolving landscape of obfuscation techniques used by malware authors causes major problems in the identification, analysis and modelling of malware by security analysts. Clustering malware variants based on their behavior has potential to create better malware analysis systems. In this work, we cluster samples from the EMBER dataset that contains features extracted from malevolent Windows portable executable files. We expand on well-known algorithms through extensive testing and discuss the results of the top performing algorithms in terms of clustering metrics and Weighted F1-score.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.144
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.300
Teacher spread0.272 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it